Saturday, September 10, 2011

The Most Searing Event Of My Life

Sunday
will mark the tenth anniversary of 9/11—a day of unspeakable horror and
unparalleled heroism.

The
day was clear and bright—a beautiful blue sky draped the city that never
sleeps. By mid-morning, the Manhattan
skyline became shrouded in smoke.

We
now know that the aircraft which crashed into the first tower of the World
Trade Center was traveling at a speed of approximately 586 miles per hour—its
fuel tanks filled with 10,000 gallons of jet fuel. Twelve weeks after the terrorist atrocity there
was at least one fire still burning in the rubble making it the longest burning
structural fire in history. We never,
before that day, thought of passenger planes as weapons.

There
is still an ache in my heart ten years after and tears are streaming down my
face as I write these words.

Tom
Brokaw commented, “Almost as soon as the Twin Towers came down the flags went
up. They began to grow in every crevice
of America. Someone said the sight of
them is like countless bandages of patriotism covering a nation’s wounds.”

One
of the iconic photographs that emerged was that of a small blonde-haired girl
atop her father’s shoulders at a candlelight vigil; her right arm outstretched
holding a small American flag.

The
television networks had small images, called “bugs”, of the flag superimposed
on the screen for weeks after the attacks.
Fox News maintained that image for many months after all the others
discontinued its use.

Part
of the fourth stanza of “America The Beautiful” reads: “O beautiful for patriot dream, that sees
beyond the years. Thine alabaster cities
gleam, undimmed by human tears.” Dan
Rather wept on the David Letterman show as he recited these words. He noted, “We can never sing that song again
the same way.”

Peggy
Noonan writing for the Wall
Street Journalnoted, “When you ask New
Yorkers now what they remember, they start with something big—the first news
report, the phone call in which someone said, ‘Turn on the TV.’ But then they
go to the kind of small thing that when you first saw it you had no idea it
would stay in your mind forever. The look on the face of a young Asian woman on
Sixth Avenue in the 20s, as she looked upward. The votive candles on the street
and the spontaneous shrines that popped up, the pictures of saints. The Xeroxed
signs that covered every street pole downtown. A man or a woman in a family
picture from a wedding or a birthday or bar mitzvah. ‘Have you seen Carla? Last
seen Tuesday morning in Windows on the World.’”

She
continues, “They tell us to get over it, they say to
move on, and they mean it well: We can't bring an air of tragedy into the
future. But I will never get over it. To get over it is to get over the guy who
stayed behind on a high floor with his friend who was in a wheelchair. To get
over it is to get over the woman by herself with the sign in the darkness: ‘America
You Are Not Alone.’ To get over it is to get over the guys who ran into the
fire and not away from the fire.”

“You've got to be loyal to pain sometimes to be loyal to the glory
that came out of it.”

E. J Dionne, in a
September 7, 2011 screed for the Washington
Post, suggests it is time to leave 9/11 behind. "After we honor the 10th anniversary of
the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, we need to leave the day behind. Al-Qaeda is a
dangerous enemy. But our country and the world were never threatened by the
caliphate of its mad fantasies."

From the men and women
who began that dreadful Tuesday morning sitting at their desk or in an airport
to the brave passengers on Flight 93 who defied their murderers to prevent the
murder of others on the ground to the rescuers who stared death in the face, we
will weep and offer our deepest sympathy.
To the children, spouses and friends of those who left them that day we
say you are not alone.

On Sunday, September 16, 2001, during a two-hour special
presentation of Fox News Sunday, Tony Snow offered a moving commentary:

"Good and evil almost never express themselves as harshly and
clearly as they did Tuesday morning. People we don't know slaughtered people we
do and they did it with contemptuous calm. Yet, even as clouds of dust and
smoke rose from the rubble, even as family members tortured by hope and doubt
took to the streets with pictures and pleas, even as mobs celebrated in Gaza,
Cairo, and Baghdad, something shook itself sluggishly to life and that something
is a sense of ourselves.”

“Kindness flourished amid the flames: a couple carried a disabled
man down sixty-eight flights of stairs, a priest crouched to give last rites as
a mighty tower collapsed, and the hand of God closed about him. A man and
woman, their hope gone, held each other and leaped. A solitary candle, a flag,
a tear. These are the tokens of our renewal.”

“The United States had a spirit before it had a name; one of faith
and freedom, of ambition tempered by piety. We once were a nation of neighbors
and friends, we are again today. We once were a nation of hardship-tested
dreamers, we are again today. We once were a nation under God and we are again
today.”

“Our enemies attacked one nation, they will encounter another. For
they underestimated us. Today in our grief and in our rage, our determination
and hope, we've summoned what's best and noblest in us; the kinship that awes our
enemies and friends alike. We are again Americans."

On October 8, 2001 President Bush addressed the nation. In his speech he revealed, “I recently
received a touching letter that says a lot about the state of America in these
difficult times, a letter from a fourth-grade girl with a father in the
military. ‘As much as I don’t want my
dad to fight,’ she wrote, ‘I’m willing to give him to you.’ This is a precious
gift. The greatest she could give. This young girl knows what America is all
about.”

For
anyone, anyone, to say we must leave 9/11 behind must have a black, cold
heart. I will never forget. May God bless America today and every day.

"There is still an ache in my heart ten years after and tears are streaming down my face as I write these words." I know the feeling. I just sent an email to a friend, just describing some of the stuff that will post on my blog tomorrow, and I teared up just trying to describe it in the most general terms.

Thanks for writing this. It says what a whole lot of us are thinking and feeling this weekend.

"I will never forget." They will have to pry the photographs and the memories of that day from my cold, dead fingers before I will forget.

It was the worst day of my life, and still is. I have no ties to NY or the Pentagon or any of the victims, except that I'm an American whose heart was ripped out on that terrible Tuesday morning. America is more than just a country to millions of citizens, and when those Islamic jihadist scumbag murderers attacked on 9/11, they attacked ALL of us. Ten years later, and no, I don't cry like I did back then over it, but I do still feel that slug to the gut and my eyes mist up a bit.

Please scribble on my walls otherwise how will I know what you think, but please don’t try spamming me or you’ll earn a quick trip to the spam filter where you will remain—cold, frightened and all alone.